Druid Questing

Last night was a night of questing for my druid, Alamein. She had been hanging around with Eric's Draenei paladin and DK's shady rogue, running quests in Westfall. In a couple of sessions with them, she had leveled up to 16, so I knew she was ready for a couple of the druid quests -- for Cure Poison and Aquatic Form. I figured it would be a 'down' night and I would quickly bang through the quests. Well, that's not exactly how it worked. Those two quests involve a good bit of travel and some challenging combat for a solo player, and it took me a couple hours to complete both.

There's a lot of travel involved, but at least I had saved both quests for the same trip, and that made things much more efficient. I went to Darnassus and picked up both quests, then teleported to Moonglade to get started. The first step in the Aquatic Form quest is to grab a bauble from Lake Elune'ara and then run to the Shrine of Remulous. Easy enough. Then I had to figure out who had the 'tips' for where to find the two half-pendants.

Here I made a choice not to look up the quest details online. It was tempting as I was starting to realize how long the quest string was going to be. But I decided to play the content out in-game as much as possible, in order to enjoy it as it was created. There are amazing resources available online; I don't know how I would have learned certain things without either looking them up or begging for help in-game. I've tried to take a policy of not looking things up until I've given it a good try in-game.

That did draw the Aquatic Form quest out quite a bit, as I had to visit just about everyone in town before I found that the flight masters had the necessary information. So, it looked like Auberdine was my next destination for both quests. Talk to a few NPCs and then I'm off.

My first stop was the falls at the head of the Cliffspring River, to fill a phial. There were a few naga to draw out, but they came one at a time; it took a bit of work but they both went down OK. What I wasn't prepared for was the spawn after I filled the phial; the two naga together caught me by surprise. I didn't fight them well, but may well have died even if I had. So -- a long run back to rez, but at least I had the sample I needed.

Next stop was the first half of the Aquatic Form pendant. That's close by -- just offshore where the Cliffspring River flows into the ocean. This too was a difficult quest, because of the level 18 threshers. I aggro'd one very quickly when I swam offshore, and had to fight him blind a bit (which is somehow harder than it looks). I had to be pretty tactical about the fight, but he wasn't too bad for a mob two levels higher than me. I swam out to the first set of rocks -- a three-pronged set -- and got jumped again. I found that I could wait in the middle of the three rocks, and the thresher couldn't reach me; if I waited, he would de-aggro and leave. That wasn't bad, but still I had to navigate past a whole herd of threshers. That rock is well defended! I ended up fighting two more threshers, but on my terms, in order to open up the path. I got the pendant half and swam back to shore without any trouble.

Back to Auberdine, where I checked in on the Cure Poison quest. Next step was to gather earthroot and lunar funguses. Alamein isn't an herbalist (skinning and leatherworking), but my Draenei shaman Tobruk is. So I logged in with her and mailed over five earthroot. While waiting for the mail, I had Alamein go looking for the fungus.

The moonkin caves are easy enough to find, but in the first one I just couldn't find the fungus. Here's where I gave in and looked it up on Allakhazam, and got the key tip that the mushrooms are relatively tiny. I hadn't realized how many different types there were in the caves, and had expected something obvious to collect. Once I had it figured, it was easy enough to collect; at level 16, I had no problems with the moonkin. After getting all the fungus I needed, I still hadn't received my earthroot mail, so I took a trip to Darnassus. I was willing to buy it at the auction house, but there was almost none for sale -- just one set of 3, when I needed 5, and they didn't have a buyout anyway. So, nothing for it except to wait for the mail, which took maybe 45 minutes or an hour in real time. Kind of slow!

But eventually it came, I went back to Auberdine, healed the sick deer, and then went back to Darnassus to finish the Cure Poison quest. Halfway there! So now I had to head to Westfall to get the other half of the Aquatic Form pendant. At least that travel was easy; my hearthstone took me straight to Sentinel Hill. I've spent enough time in Westfall that I had no trouble running to the quarry. I had to kill off a few murlocs, but they weren't too big a worry, and from there I swam out to sea.

I wasn't expecting to fight any mobs, so I was a bit surprised to see a reef shark patrolling the edge of the deep water. Fortunately I saw and avoided him, and could swim out to grab the other pendant half. Much easier! Rather than swim all the way back, I teleported straight to Moonglade from the bubbling vent. Talk to Dendrite Starblaze, head once more to Darnassus, finish the quest, and then cavort in the Darnassus lakes in my new aquatic body.

So -- a lot of work! But I didn't mind. The quests were actually quite interesting, and involved enough variety that I didn't feel like I was grinding. The swimming portions provide for an unusual navigation challenge, and the mobs all required different tactics. And the storylines are interesting too. It would be even more interesting (and challenging) if I hadn't been to Westfall before. The quests weren't easy to solo, but I think they should be done that way; after all, these are class-specific and give personal abilities.

Which is also part of the problem. Eric and DK and I play a couple times a week, so I had plenty of downtime. But if we were grouping more frequently -- or if I was trying to catch up to them in levels -- these quests would be quite frustrating. They involve travel to four zones and multiple back-and-forth trips, plus lots of running within the zones. There's just no good way to zip through them quickly.

Maybe that's the point...

Unexpected Roleplaying

So there I was. I had rolled a new gnome rogue, as I didn't have a rogue yet on Shandris. (Which brings me to sixteen... but I digress.) I had leveled her up to 7 and was running around Dun Morogh, tackling one of the early quests near Frostmane Hold. I glanced around and saw another character duck behind a ridge in the area. I was curious -- there were few players around at the time -- so I kept watching. I didn't see much, until something peeked out from behind the ridge. It was a Felhunter... and the level was ??. Ack! Horde in Dun Morogh!

I wasn't concerned; Shandris isn't PvP and of course I wasn't flagged either. But I thought someone might be interested so I tossed a quick message out on the Local Defense channel: "Horde warlock near Frostmane Hold". (Which was, I think, my first message on one of the main channels.) As I mentioned, there weren't many players online, so I wasn't expecting much response. And I just had one response, from someone named "Slayerr" or "DangerX" something similar. (I'll call him "Slayerr".)

"wat lvl r they" he asked
"I dunno, he has a felhunter, 40+?" I (incorrectly) answered.
"hold on i will coem help u" came the response.

Well, I didn't need any help. Might be fun to try PvP at some point... but this wasn't going to be it. But he sent a party invite, and I figured, what the heck, maybe he just needs help finding the guy, so I accepted.

During all this, I'd lost track of the Hordie. But then I started seeing more messages come across the Local Defense channel:

"Coldridge Pass is under attack!"
"Dun Morogh is under attack!"
"do not feer, i am coming" said Slayerr.

Of course you are, I thought. He was coming down from Ironforge, and had a ways to go. So I checked Slayerr's stats: Draenei Paladin... level 10. Level 10? I'm not sure what he's up to but it should be amusing. Let's see what happens.

We chatted a bit as he was coming up, and I found two things interesting. For one, he didn't seem to be a native English speaker. Lots of typos, but in ways that weren't normal for standard casual or haXX0r chat. And, he was roleplaying.

It took me a while to recognize. I'm intrigued by roleplaying in WoW but haven't tried it yet, since I'm still trying to understand what I'm doing in the game. Of course Shandris isn't an RP realm. And a name like "Slayerr" (or whatever it was) doesn't sound like a RP name. But sure enough, Slayerr was roleplaying, which probably explained why this headstrong Paladin was gunning for a Horde more than 20 levels above him.

I didn't think much of it, though. Slayerr finally showed up and wanted to go looking for the Warlock. (Based on my brief glimpse, it was probably Undead but I couldn't be sure.) We looped over towards Coldridge Pass and headed up the road towards Kharanos.

And that's where we saw the Dwarven mortar team.

They'd been massacred by the Hordie. He'd left their bodies strewn around the tents; obviously he'd taken the time to battle them all and easily slain them. It is a bit shocking to see, especially since the "Ammo for Rumbleshot" quest shows you some good, amusing roleplaying from these NPCs. And Slayerr took this to heart.

"oh NO!"
"hou coud this happen!"
Slayerr kneels.

I threw in a /cry, since it seemed appropriate. But Slayerr knelt for a long time -- maybe a minute. "Wow," I thought, "he's really into this." I was curious to see how he played it out, so I knelt too and waited. After a bit more, he rose and spoke again.

"they tryed there hardest but he was too strong"
"they did not dye in veen"
"i will avenge them!"

I was impressed with the roleplaying. It's nothing magical -- all tied to game events, and nothing really out of the blue. But still, it was cool to see. The spelling was a bit offputting (wish I had saved it exactly) but the effect was pretty cool. It intrigued me to see more roleplaying, and I might have to roll a character on an RP realm before too long.

But at the time, I had had enough. "Sorry, I have to go. Good luck on your quest," I said. "I undertaand... be brave" he replied. I ungrouped and ran away.

But, I was playing a rogue. So I suppose, in a small way, I was roleplaying too.

So Many Characters

Man, I have a lot of characters.

I totally get why you'd want to stick to a primary character, maybe with an alt or two. It's a faster route to higher levels, as well as new content and more impressive items. But frankly that's not enough for me at the moment. I'm more intrigued by exploring the different styles of play that different classes have, and the different looks (and environments) provided by different races.

So I end up with fifteen characters.

Here's the whole list:

Shandris

• Gnome mage
  
• Night elf druid
  
• Human warrior
  
• Draenei shaman
  
• Dwarf warrior
  
• Human paladin
  
• Gnome rogue
  Terenas
  
• Human rogue
  
• Night elf hunter
  Drenden
  
• Undead rogue
  
• Blood elf hunter
  Kul Tiras
  
• Human warlock
  
• Dwarf warrior
  
• Undead mage
  
• Dwarf warrior
  
• Night elf rogue

OK, that's pretty silly, even for me. Some of that's a bit inflated; three or four of the characters were created by Eric and DK when they were trying the game out at my place. And a couple more are destined for quick death -- one dwarf warrior is a naked corpse in the Frostmane Hold at the moment.

But why all the others? In a word, variety. I was curious to try out a wide range of looks and styles. And it's fun that way, too. Sometimes I'm just in a mood to summon demons, while other times I prefer to stab someone in the back. I'm just that way.

Those are my two highest level characters -- the human rogue and warlock, both in their mid-20s. About the time that I got them to where they are, first Eric then DK began to play. For whatever reason, they started characters on Shandris, and so we've been doing most of our playing there.

It is annoying to be spread across four realms. Well, it was intentional with the Horde characters -- not much point in sharing a server with the Alliance characters. But the others came about right around the launch of Burning Crusade, when load queues were long and patches were frequent. When all your characters are low level, there's a major temptation to just log into another realm and start someone new. Now it's an annoyance, and I'm contemplating whether I should move my higher-level characters to another realm.

It's also nice to have shared professions on the same realm. I found this out when my rogue hit 20 and got the recipe for Thistle Tea. Very cool -- until I saw the prices for Swiftthistle. Ouch! She is fairly accomplished at leatherworking (up to about 145 I believe) and isn't rich with maybe 5 gold at the time. So I switched her realm-mate night elf hunter to Herbalism, and quickly worked up to cutting Magebloom and Briarthorn (which sell well enough in their own right, too). And of course, the rogue can send leather armor back to the hunter as well; it's all very convenient and cozy.

I'm sure it won't continue. With Eric and DK on Shandris, that's where the bulk of our attention will focus. My characters on other realms will be either killed (sniff) or maybe condensed into a single alternate realm. And even some of my Shandris toons will be left behind.

But for now, I'm heavily invested in multiple personality disorder. And loving it.

Getting the Shakes

I said in my first post that I'd be away from the game for a week or so. And that may extend to more than a week.

(Hold me!)

Actually it's worse than that: my Mac is in the shop. So I'm without all my normal outlets -- most notably games and photography. And I can't buckle down and finish my taxes either. I can still get online via other machines we have in the house, but either they're owned by work (which means I can't install anything fun on them) or they're woefully underpowered for either WoW or photo work.

So what happened? The sad thing is that really, nothing happened. Rewind to a year or so ago. I'd been planning to buy a Macintosh for quite some time, and my savings added up at the same time that the first Macbook Pros were released. So I jumped into the world of Intel Macs. I knew the risks I was running, and I'd read the early problem reports, so I knew that I'd be taking some chances with it.

Really though, it hasn't been bad. For the most part, it has worked fine and done everything I've asked of it. It had just a couple minor issues. One was that I couldn't install memory in the second slot. The other was that it would occasionally reboot at random. Really just an annoyance, as I'm compulsive about saving repeatedly as I'm working on something. So even the occasional reboot wasn't a huge issue.

That is, until I started playing WoW.

It had happened several times for me. Some days everything would be fine, but some days it would reboot one or more times while I was playing. Always annoying, but of course much more so when I was in combat! The kicker for me was last week when I was partied up with Eric and DK. We were on the Collector quest. We had just jumped into combat with The Collector and his two cronies when the screen went black. I was, shall we say, agitated.

Truth was it wasn't going to be a problem; by the time I got back online I found that my hunter and warlock friends had tidily cleaned everything up. I was able to loot the corpse for the necessary ring. But still, I just missed an amusing fight. What's the point of that?

I rebooted again a short while later. This time, we were just departing Stormwind. My paladin was leading the way out the gates, when everything went black. Wait for reboot and get back onto Skype, only to find my friends still laughing. Evidently, when my machine went belly-up, my character kept on moving... long enough to walk right over the edge of the Valley of Heroes.

I'm so glad it was amusing for them, but frankly it was getting to be a bit much. I knew it was time for a repair when my agitated cursing gave way to resigned depression. My warranty was due to expire in the next month or so, so it was high time to get the thing fixed. And so Saturday morning I went to visit my local Apple store. My machine is now on its way to the repair center. Fixing the reboot problem is crucial, and I'll also be excited to install that extra 1G SODIMM I've been sitting on.

The upshot? No gaming for me for 7-10 days. Frankly, it surprises me how much I miss it. But I'll find other things to do.

Right?

Getting the Shakes

I said in my first post that I'd be away from the game for a week or so. And that may extend to more than a week.

(Hold me.)

Actually it's worse than that: my Mac is in the shop. So I'm without all my normal outlets -- most notably games and photography. And I can't buckle down and finish my taxes either. I can still get online via other machines we have in the house, but either they're owned by work (which means I can't install anything fun on them) or they're woefully underpowered for either WoW or photo work.

So what happened? The sad thing is that really, nothing happened. Rewind to a year or so ago. I'd been planning to buy a Macintosh for quite some time, and my savings added up at the same time that the first Macbook Pros were released. So I jumped into the world of Intel Macs. I knew the risks I was running, and I'd read the early problem reports, so I knew that I'd be taking some chances with it.

Really though, it hasn't been bad. For the most part, it has worked fine and done everything I've asked of it. It had just a couple minor issues. One was that I couldn't install memory in the second slot. The other was that it would occasionally reboot at random. Really just an annoyance, as I'm compulsive about saving repeatedly as I'm working on something. So even the occasional reboot wasn't a huge issue.

That is, until I started playing WoW.

It had happened several times for me. Some days everything would be fine, but some days it would reboot one or more times while I was playing. Always annoying, but of course much more so when I was in combat! The kicker for me was last week when I was partied up with Eric and DK. We were on the Collector quest. We had just jumped into combat with The Collector and his two cronies when the screen went black. I was, shall we say, agitated.

Truth was it wasn't going to be a problem; by the time I got back online I found that my hunter and warlock friends had tidily cleaned everything up. I was able to loot the corpse for the necessary ring. But still, I just missed an amusing fight. What's the point of that?

I rebooted again a short while later. This time, we were just departing Stormwind. My paladin was leading the way out the gates, when everything went black. Wait for reboot and get back onto Skype, only to find my friends still laughing. Evidently, when my machine went belly-up, my character kept on moving... long enough to walk right over the edge of the Valley of Heroes.

I'm so glad it was amusing for them, but frankly it was getting to be a bit much. My warranty was due to expire in the next month or so; it was time to get the thing fixed. And so Saturday morning I went to visit my local Apple store, and my machine is now on its way to the repair center. Fixing the reboot problem is crucial, and I'll also be excited to install that extra 1G SODIMM I've been sitting on.

So no gaming for me for a while. Frankly, it surprises me how much I miss it. But I'll find other things to do... for a while.

The start of an obsession

Short version: I can blame it all on my brother.

Long version: I am not a serious gamer. But I have spent a lot of time with various games. One of those was the original Diablo, and eventually both Eric and I spent quite a bit of time on Diablo II. So we were rather well acquainted with Blizzard through that.

When WoW came out, I was a bit confused. I was familiar with the Warcraft series, even though I'd never played it. And I wasn't sure how you could make a RTS into a MMO game. Even when I learned the details, it seemed like an odd combination. And after the isometric projections of the Diablo games, I wasn't jazzed about the first-person perspective of WoW. At any rate, I didn't have the hardware or the dedication to get involved with it. So I went down different paths.

One of the games I enjoyed during that time was Call of Duty. And I played quite a bit of it. But online play was a different beast. My brother and I played a few times, and I played on my own too. But frankly, we weren't even close to skilled enough. The curve is so steep that there was no way to compete with even normal players online. My tactics weren't good enough, I got lost in the maps, and (maybe most importantly) my reaction speed just wasn't fast enough. Not enough twitch in these almost-40-years-old hands, I guess.

So, back to my brother. Knowing me perhaps too well, he gave me WoW as a Christmas gift. It sounded good, but I was reluctant, based on my limited previous online experience. After a few days, though, I loaded it up and began to play. After all, I could try the initial 14 days and then quit if it sucked -- or if I sucked at it.

It didn't. I didn't.

Maybe later I'll post a detailed recollection of my first impressions. But I can give a quick summary. One, the UI took a bit of getting used to. It was more complex than the WWII FPS games I'd spent time with. But after maybe 5 minutes, I was moving around quite well. And oh my, but Azeroth was a beautiful place.

So, that was in late December. I've been playing WoW -- a lot -- since then. I knew that Eric and DK would be interested too, so at some point I invited them over to check it out. And they fell in love as well. Both started asking for chances to come over and play their own characters. Soon, Eric gave in, upgraded his Macintosh, and began his own WoW career. And not long after that, DK followed the same path.

And that brings us to now. The three of us will play separately and play together; we'll arrange times to meet up online and play 3-man teams. We haven't been at it long -- two weeks, perhaps. But we're having a blast.

Welcome!

Yes: it's yet another World of Warcraft blog.

You may be searching for detailed strategies, tales of epic conquest, or a how-to guide to leveling to 70 in two weeks. Maybe you're looking for the best build for your rogue. Perhaps you're searching for a good strategy for leveling your Engineering to 375 as efficiently as possible. In other words, you're looking for 133t info.

You won't find that here.

In short, Passport to Shandris is the story of Cisko, Eric and DK. We're not your stereotypical WoW players. We're all older, working adults, with mortgages and jobs. Two of us are married. We have fairly busy social lives. Oh, we're geeks all right. And we're pretty caught up in an exciting and interesting game. But we're not the stereotypes you hear about playing WoW.

What we are is a refutation of the myth. There is some truth to the myth, of course. There are a good number of WoW players who have no social lives and devote dozens of hours per week to the game. And there are a lot of teen (or pre-teen) kids running amok around Azeroth. But with 8 million players, there's a huge number of relatively normal and balanced people playing WoW.

Maybe more importantly, we're doing everything the 'wrong' way. All three of us have started a large number of characters. I have 15 characters started on four realms. I don't know for sure about Eric and DK but they're probably getting up there too. None of us are paying a lot of attention to the 'best' Talent builds or the best strategies for leveling or professions or anything else. If there's a right way to play WoW... we are doing it wrong. And with our laid-back approach, and our reasonably limited time to play, we may never get into the endgame content.

And we're pretty OK with that. If you want to get from point A to B as fast as possible, there are good ways to do it, and more power to you. But we're taking our time and enjoying the journey. We do a lot of reading online -- it's almost essential to understand what's going on and how to some things. But none of us are obsessed about finding the absolute most efficient way to do anything.

As the three of us have been playing, both together and separately, we've shared our stories with one another. This blog is designed to give us a good way to share a lot of those stories, and to keep up with what we're doing. But I'd also like to write down some observations about WoW from the perspective of a casual player.

So that's the plan. We'll drop some more posts out here soon, especially because I'll be away from the game for a week or so. (eek!)